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100% agree with Allen Holub. If your policy is no-ship-fridays because you're worried about things breaking and having to work the wkd, then your code quality

100% agree with Allen Holub. If your policy is no-ship-fridays because you're worried about things breaking and having to work the wkd, then your code quality is shit and you need to get better at being a software engineer.

amluto 3y ago
Until we have formal verification that works across an API boundary where the parties are at different companies or much more extensive than usual test suites, changes to one end of an API endpoint will pass all manner of testing and still fail a customer use case. On Sunday afternoon in industries that ship over the weekend and start working again on Sunday.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
It’s all a trade off. We tend to avoid Friday deployments because they give us no tangible benefit while increasing the chance of an out of band issue. At a practical level, our customers literally do not notice if something ships at 4pm on a Friday or 10am on a Monday. As for velocity, we can move way way faster by risking some bad deployments. Catching bugs is an exponential time trade off. We could catch most bugs, but we’d move like molasses. Instead, we catch what’s reasonable then ship during periods where it’s likely for us to recover quickly and easily. Most companies will benefit from fastest shipping velocity at the trade off of occasional bad deployments.
redserk 3y ago
And on what grounds/experience can you so quickly hand-wave all code that doesn't ship on Fridays as "shit"? This is lacking in nuance that anyone with experience would otherwise have. Bugs happen. Sometimes bugs take a day or two to surface and aren't caught in dev/QA. I would suspect there is a planning issue somewhere if an engineering team is brought to a standstill if they prefer not to ship on 1 workday of the week. We save boring work for Fridays. We knock out quality-of-life patches/scripts/cleanup tasks. We'll review external and internal docs. We'll even explicitly verify the functionality of sufficiently large features, which has saved us a few times. Friday is our day to do tasks that improve quality. I've seen enough weekends saved by not deploying on Fridays for me to be skeptical of any contrarian dogma that demands it's universal removal.

amluto 3y ago

Until we have formal verification that works across an API boundary where the parties are at different companies or much more extensive than usual test suites, changes to one end of an API endpoint will pass all manner of testing and still fail a customer use case. On Sunday afternoon in industries that ship over the weekend and start working again on Sunday.

SkyPuncher 3y ago

It’s all a trade off. We tend to avoid Friday deployments because they give us no tangible benefit while increasing the chance of an out of band issue. At a practical level, our customers literally do not notice if something ships at 4pm on a Friday or 10am on a Monday. As for velocity, we can move way way faster by risking some bad deployments. Catching bugs is an exponential time trade off. We could catch most bugs, but we’d move like molasses. Instead, we catch what’s reasonable then ship during periods where it’s likely for us to recover quickly and easily. Most companies will benefit from fastest shipping velocity at the trade off of occasional bad deployments.

redserk 3y ago

And on what grounds/experience can you so quickly hand-wave all code that doesn't ship on Fridays as "shit"? This is lacking in nuance that anyone with experience would otherwise have. Bugs happen. Sometimes bugs take a day or two to surface and aren't caught in dev/QA. I would suspect there is a planning issue somewhere if an engineering team is brought to a standstill if they prefer not to ship on 1 workday of the week. We save boring work for Fridays. We knock out quality-of-life patches/scripts/cleanup tasks. We'll review external and internal docs. We'll even explicitly verify the functionality of sufficiently large features, which has saved us a few times. Friday is our day to do tasks that improve quality. I've seen enough weekends saved by not deploying on Fridays for me to be skeptical of any contrarian dogma that demands it's universal removal.